Monday, April 11, 2016

Bernie Sanders: Morality and Justice

A report dubs America the “Unequal States of America” due to its gaping wealth inequality.

The world is awash in personal wealth: $153.2 trillion in total, according to Allianz’s new Global Wealth Report 2015. That’s enough to pay three times the world’s sovereign debt, the debts of each nation. The report, which measured 2014 wealth, found 2014 was the third consecutive year in which global wealth grew more than 7%.

The jump was largely the result of households pumping up their personal savings efforts. The U.S. — with $63.5 trillion in total private wealth — holds the largest amount of any country in the world. But that wealth is unevenly distributed, and nowhere is that more evident than in the U.S., which also has the largest wealth inequality gap of 55 countries studied, according to the report.

While America’s growing income inequality has been the source of much debate, this report examined the wealth — which includes not just salary, but also property and investments held by a family. The report found that America’s wealth inequality is even more gaping its income inequality. In fact, the report dubbed the U.S. the “Unequal States of America” due to the size of the gap.

Consider this:

America’s child poverty levels are worse than in any developed country anywhere, including Greece,devastated by a euro crisis, and eastern European nations such as Poland, Lithuania and Estonia.

Median adult wealth in the US ($39,000) is 27th globally, putting it behind Cyprus, Taiwan, and Ireland.

Overall, America’s per capita wealth, health and education measures are mediocre for a highly industrialized nation. Well-being metrics, perceptions of corruption, quality and cost of basic services, are sliding, too. Healthcare and education spending are funding bloated administrations even while human outcomes sink, the authors say. Read more; 12 signs America is on the decline

"The United States is owned and dominated today by a hierarchy of its sixty richest families, buttressed by no more than ninety families of lesser wealth... These families are the living center of the modern industrial oligarchy which dominates the United States, functioning discreetly under a de jure democratic form of government behind which a de facto government, absolutist and plutocratic in its lineaments, has gradually taken form since the Civil War. Thisde facto government is actually the government of the United States -- informal, invisible, shadowy. It is the government of money in a dollar democracy." Read more; America's 60 Families

From the Kennedys to the Kochs to the Waltons, the list is made up of 185 families, some famed for their historic and dynastic wealth, while others are simply American success stories and have only relatively recently become fabulously rich.

The staggering collective wealth of the 185 richest families in the United States is $1.2 trillion dollars and all the names on the list reveal at least some link to either industrial heydays long gone like the Rockefellers or successful brands still in operation such as Hallmark, Budweiser, Mars and Getty Oil.

The list from Forbes also reveals that the richest family in America is the richest family in the entire world, the Waltons.

Worth an incredible $152 billion, which is $63 billion more than the second richest family, the controversial Koch brothers, the Walton family is three living children of Wal-Mart Stores founder Sam Walton, and includes the wife of son John and the two daughters of his brother and business partner James Walton. Read more; The 50 Richest Families In America!

The Oxfam report An Economy for the 1%, shows that the wealth of the poorest half of the world’s population has fallen by a trillion dollars since 2010, a drop of 38 percent. This has occurred despite the global population increasing by around 400 million people during that period. Meanwhile, the wealth of the richest 62 has increased by more than half a trillion dollars to $1.76tr. The report also shows how women are disproportionately affected by inequality – of the current ‘62’, 53 are men and just nine are women.

Although world leaders have increasingly talked about the need to tackle inequality, and in September agreed a global goal to reduce it, the gap between the richest and the rest has widened dramatically in the past 12 months. Oxfam’s prediction, made ahead of last year’s Davos, that the 1% would soon own more than the rest of us, actually came true in 2015 - a year earlier than expected.

Oxfam is calling for urgent action to tackle the extreme inequality crisis which threatens to undermine the progress made in tackling poverty during the last quarter of a century. As a priority, it is calling for an end to the era of tax havens which has seen the increasing use of offshore centers by rich individuals and companies to avoid paying their fair share to society. This has denied governments valuable resources needed to tackle poverty and inequality.